The Karitiana or Caritiana are an
indigenous people of Brazil, whose reservation is located in the western
Amazon
Amazon most often refers to:
* Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology
* Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin
* Amazon River, in South America
* Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...
. They count 320 members, and the leader of their tribal association is Renato Caritiana. They subsist by farming, fishing and hunting, and have almost no contact with the outside world. Their tongue, the
Karitiâna language
Karitiana, otherwise known as Caritiana or Yjxa, is a Tupian language spoken in the State of Rondônia, Brazil, by 210 out of 320 Karitiana people, or 400 according to Cláudio Karitiana, in the Karitiana reserve 95 kilometres south of Porto Vel ...
, is an
Arikém language
The Arikem languages of Brazil form a branch of the Tupian language family.
They are Karitiâna and the extinct Kabixiana and Arikem.
Varieties
Below is a list of Arikém language varieties listed by Loukotka (1968), including names of unat ...
of
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
.
Studies of
population genetics
Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and between populations, and is a part of evolutionary biology. Studies in this branch of biology examine such phenomena as adaptation, speciation, and pop ...
often use the Karitiana as a reference population for Native Americans, using DNA samples made available through the
Human Genome Diversity Project and other sources. DNA from Karitiana individuals was collected in 1987 by Francis Black and in 2007 it was reported that this sampling was undertaken unbeknownst to
FUNAI, the Brazilian agency that regulates contact between the indigenous tribes and the outside world, and that the samples were being distributed for a fee with no benefit to the Karitiana, giving rise to claims of
biopiracy
Biopiracy (also known as scientific colonialism) is defined as the unauthorized appropriation of knowledge and genetic resources of farming and indigenous communities by individuals or institutions seeking exclusive monopoly control through patent ...
. The same newspaper report claimed that further samples were taken in 1996 by Dr. Hilton Pereira da Silva, a doctor on a documentary film crew, on the promise of medicinal supplies that were never fulfilled. A response from Dr. Silva suggests that the news story was faulty and the medicinal samples he took were never used for any commercial purpose.
Origins
A 2015 genetic study reached a surprising conclusion about the origins of the Karitiana people. While the Karitiana people are closely related to other Native Americans, they share closer relations to Southeast Asians & Polynesians compared with other Native Americans which are closest to Siberians and Northeast Asians.
A study by Iosif Lazaridis (2014) found Karitiana to carry Mal'ta MA1 (41%) admixture while the other geneflow in Karitiana appears to have an Eastern Eurasian origin.
A study by Kanazawa-Kiriyama et al. (2017) detected gene flow from Karitiana to Mal'ta MA1 (21%) which is in the reverse direction of what was reported in previous studies such as Raghavan ''et al.'' 2014 who used a much larger sequence data. The authors speculate that the inverse flow could be due to Ancient Beringian migration in a westward migration into Eurasia.
References
External links
Karitiâna artwork National Museum of the American Indian"In the Amazon, Giving Blood but Getting Nothing,"''New York Times'' article about Karitiana and DNA collection
Ethnic groups in Brazil
Indigenous peoples in Brazil
Indigenous peoples of the Amazon
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